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<\/a>There is nothing as real as a memory confirmed, day after day.<\/p><\/div>\n
Remember Joe McGinniss in The Last Brother<\/strong>, his biography of Ted Kennedy? He invented speeches<\/a> but, as I recall (all the search I\u2018m willing to do), argued that by the time he finished writing the book, he knew the speakers well enough to know what they would have said.<\/p>\n And Edmund Morris in Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan<\/strong> invented a narrator\/author<\/a> because (as I recall he argued in an op\/ed piece reprinted in, maybe, the Star Tribune<\/strong>, but which I can\u2018t verify without access to licensed databases which I do not have) he needed it, as, regarding former President Reagan, either there was a there there and he couldn\u2019t find it or there was no there there. But as a scholar and generous man, he added that probably it was there and he could not find it. I may be letter-wrong on his words, but I think the spirit is right.<\/p>\n Then Jonah Lehrer reused his own words <\/a>without change. Good grief! Telling the same story twice is surely a definition of getting old. Thinking the same story is better the second time is a big-time dotage alert.<\/p>\n Fareed Zakaria\u2019s plagiarism<\/a> is especially hard to understand because he copied from a recent essay by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker<\/strong> which was bound to have been read by many of his readers. So why not cite it and add why he admired it? He also gave two commencement addresses which were much alike. What is wrong with these guys?<\/p>\n Varied rocks together make great stone walls; always worth a walker's search.<\/p><\/div>\n Search tactics are always worth citing, if only to lend credibility to one\u2019s conclusions. I love books that depend upon the search to exist, especially if the reader is let in on the process. This summer\u2019s best example, so far, is Charles Cumming\u2019s Trinity Six<\/strong>, a novel in which he wonders if, in addition to the Cambridge Five, there was a sixth spy. The author plans the search as follows:<\/p>\n \u201cPaul, I\u2019m not an investigative journalist. I\u2019m an archive man.\u201d Already after eighty pages of Nicholas Kilmer\u2019s A Paradise for Fools<\/strong>, the library reference exchanges are worth the book. A late summer search favorite may be emerging.<\/p>\n The Produce Lady is, yet again, my hero. She did whatever it took to get blueberries when everyone else was out. Spooky sky today; wiggly cloud ends hanging down look ominous to a Midwesterner, but the sun is out now, so porch event is still on. A week from tomorrow is back to Minnesota. Always hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is wrong with these people? Jonah Lehrer, riding high, invents a quote from Bob Dylan and expects it to pass. Why? Especially when Bob Dylan\u2019s relatively few words, often cryptic and\/or mumbled, are so much considered. Jonah Lehrer hasn\u2019t … Continue reading ![\"IMG_4309.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/lh5.ggpht.com\/-RsgscDY5BIQ\/TVH6bkjJunI\/AAAAAAAAC9E\/AODK7WvEbcw\/h480\/IMG_4309.jpg\")
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\n\u201cWhat\u2019s the difference? You interview people, don\u2019t you? You can follow a trail from A to B. You know how to use a telephone, the Internet, a public library? How hard can it be? ( p.39)
\n\u201c\u2026Historians specialize in the dead\u2026.[Sam Gaddis] was a specialist in reconstruction. He knew how to piece together the fragments of a stranger\u2019s existence, to work through an archive, to pan the stream of history to reveal a nugget of priceless information.\u201d ( p.56)<\/p>\n